Computational Social Science and Culture in the Age of Social Media
Chris Bail
Duke University
Theory of cultural resonance
Theory of cultural resonance
For more detailed criticism, see Bail, Christopher A. 2015. Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, Princeton: Princeton University Press. and McDonnell, Terry, Christopher Bail, and Iddo Tavorry. 2017. “A Theory of Cultural Resonance,” Sociological Theory 35(1): 1-14 Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS.
A new theory cultural resonance
Cultural complexity
Topic validation
See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288 and the stm package in R. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
Topics
See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288 and the stm package in R. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
Coefficient of Discursive Variation
Where \( \theta \) is the standard deviation of the membership matrix of organization \( i \)'s posts in the thirty-nine topic categories during the previous week and \( \mu \) is the mean score of the posts across all topic areas during the same time period.
See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
Cultural complexity
Models control for # impressions, Org.'s # Facebook Fans, Age, Gender, Region of Fans, Budget, #Staff, Tactics, Use of Audio-Visuals, News/Blog Environment
See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
Cultural position
Cultural position
Constructing cultural networks
See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828 and the texnets package in R. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
Calculating "cultural betweenness"
Modified Djikstra Algorithm for weighted networks:
Cultural Betweenness of each organization (i) by day (t):
See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828 and the texnets package in R. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
The cultural network of Autism Civil Society Groups on Facebook
The cultural network of Autism civil society groups on facebook
Results
Results
See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828. Visual created using Cubix. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
TextNets: R Package
Webpage for package (with tutorial) http://github.com/cbail/textnets
Idealized cognitive-emotional current
Real cognitive-emotional currents
Phase shift
Where E is the amount of emotional language of organization i at time t and C is the amount of rational language or organization i at time t.
See Bail, Christopher A., Taylor W. Brown, and Marcus Mann. 2017. “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Cognitive-Emotional Currents and Public Deliberation on Social Media.”American Sociological Review, 82(6) 1188-1213. Link to this presentation: http://bit.ly/Bail_IAS
Results
Do cultural position and cultural articulation interact to produce cultural resonance?
Messaging does not occur in a vacuum/discourses enable and constrain each other
Cultural resonance is episodic; how can we calculate the possibility of cultural change at any given moment?
Solution: culture as a signed network
Constructing signed networks via text
But... Some people talk more than others
And... Sentence parsers are not perfect
And... Sentiment analysis is :(
Link for 2020 event
Forthcoming Columbia University Press 2020
Oxford Series in Computational Social Science
(No website yet)
Applying cultural concepts to politics
The next generation/lab alumni
Thank You!
Data Collection Process
Examining different Lag Lengths
Cultural Bridges in LGBT Advocacy
Cultural Bridges in Climate Change Advocacy
Cultural Bridges in Organ Donation Advocacy
